Have you been downtown to Soho lately? It's full of retail stores. Every trendy fashion label on the planet has taken over gallery space. Shops selling women’s clothes aspire to look like galleries and may even install one or two pieces of contemporary art to cash in on the Soho cachet. It is all a bit depressing. Are they saying, "Fashion is Art" or simply "we are now rich enough to buy this stuff". Weekends, the streets are choked with window shoppers. Anyone who is serious about art has moved to Chelsea. Larry Gagosian has given up on Soho. He has just purchased a decrepit building in Chelsea which he will convert into the largest commercial contemporary art gallery in New York. Move over Pace. 

Not only are the dealers finding Soho unbearable but the artists who moved into Soho during the 80’s in search of cheaper rent and larger spaces are being squeezed out. Rhea Alexander a visual artist who also runs D.I.G.S. (Duchamp’s Irreverent Guiding Spirit Inc., a design company) is an authentic loft resident of the Soho art community. "Ten years ago when I bought this loft there were artists and galleries everywhere, Soho was completely different." D.I.G.S. is located in Wooster Street, the very heart of Soho yet there are few cutting edge active art venues left there. Many galleries are now selling posters and prints, safe and steady. A typical sample of this new genre is "Jeffrey Ruesch Fine Art Limited Contemporary Prints, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Posters, Custom Framing". Other galleries go for a real melange like GALLERY 5 in Spring Street, selling "original paintings, limited edition prints, fine art glass and sculpture" and number such 'arrière-garde' artists as "Elyse" a watercolourist whose subjects get about as exciting as "White Magnolias".
 

One of the most prominent gallery spaces is Gallery Revel

Revel sells what can only be called chocolate box paintings, end of millennium impressionist nostalgia which appeals to retired middle class suburbanites. To such folk, a weekend shopping expedition to Soho must equate to a walk on the wild side and they are giddy with the reckless abandon it takes to buy "View of the Old South" by someone called Clarissa May Danes. 

No self-respecting contemporary art gallery can be seen to lurk in the shadow of such establishments. They have to run to Chelsea. 

It will only be a matter of time before the few serious galleries remaining in Soho take Mr Gagosian’s cue and follow him to Chelsea or branch out into untrodden NY territory.